Long after the boats were beached, the sailors continued to curse the bleeding coral for lacerating their feet, while Mrs Roxburgh, deposited on land by the gallant efforts of the boatswain, saw that her pretty little boots (glacé leather with cloth uppers) were slashed beyond repair due to her own foolishness.
Still exhilarated by his tumultuous, and at the time alarming, experience in the surf, Mr Roxburgh glowed, and breathed deep. ‘Who would have thought it possible!’ until remembering his wife, he approached and put his arm round her, ‘Ellen, you might have been injured!’ with a sincerity she did not doubt.
‘I am not,’ she assured him, and formally added as she had been taught, ‘thank you, Mr Roxburgh.’
It was at once evident that ‘land’ was too ambitious a word for the reef on which the castaways found themselves, though a beach of pulverized coral would make it possible to repair the long-boat at their leisure provided they could muster the materials. But of vegetation or shade there was little: nothing of that pastoral green Mr Roxburgh had hoped to find, in which to re-live the pleasures of the Georgics. Anything in the way of cover was of a grey, tough, sea-bitten variety: wiry bushes tortured by the wind, scurf of dead-green lichen, and fleshier shoots of a bitter weed which those of the men who were bred along the Bristol Channel and the Norfolk coast compared nostalgically with the samphire their women harvested at low tide from fields of mud.
For the most part level, the coral excrescence tended to rise towards the north-east, in which quarter alone, any who looked forward to solitude might hope to renew themselves. There the brush grew thicker, taller, but cowering before the strong winds to less than an average man’s size, and nowhere concentrated enough to provide an adequate refuge for introspective souls.
Even so, there was an immediate dispersal, for physical as well as spiritual reasons, of those whom the two boats disgorged, everybody consoled, not to say dazed, by a freedom they had undervalued in the past. The men set out in opposite directions, on spidery, needled legs (there were cases where one leg might have been born shorter than the other, or else deformed by grappling the deck of a listing ship) their mouths thinned by desperation or thirst, the eyes of some closed on and off in an attempt to shut out an experience which still visibly flickered in their minds. But with all, the overruling impulse was to get away from one another.
They were brought to a halt by a revival of Captain Purdew’s sense of his own authority. He proceeded to deliver something of an oration to emphasize that they had beached out of necessity, not for pleasure, and that once they were rested and refreshed, their prime concern was the repairing of the boats.
The seamen listened for the simple reason they could see no avenue of escape.
‘And re-victualling—if foodstuff of any kind is offering,’ the captain’s voice persisted, high, dry, vibrating like sail with a wind in it. ‘In that event’, he warned, ‘remember we are a community, whose duty it is to pool our resources.’
Listening to this upright old man made Mrs Roxburgh melancholy. She suspected that those who are honourable must suffer and break more often than the others, which did not absolve the honourable from continuing to offer themselves for suffering and breakage. It started her looking for her husband, who must already have gone in search of the privacy his temperament craved.
After enjoying the luxury of a postponed, ungainly, and not unexpectedly, painful stool, Austin Roxburgh was wandering with little regard for purpose or direction, kicking at the solid though harsh ground for the simple pleasure of renewing acquaintance with primordial substance. Still walking, he unbuttoned his steaming overcoat to let in the sun and wind, then removed the garment and hung it on his arm. On or off, his overcoat seemed as incongruous as most human needs; human behaviour in its niceties must only excite derision on this desert island. Thus warned against acts of feckless self-assertion he resisted the urge to bare the leaves of his saturated Elzevir in the hope that the sun’s blaze might dry them, and continued strolling through a park from which the statues had been removed.
At the island’s southernmost tip, which had been whittled down to a narrow spine of razor-edged coral, opposing currents raised their hackles in what was probably a state of permanent collision. Much as he had grown to hate the sea, Austin Roxburgh felt drawn to this desolate promontory by something solitary and arid, akin to his own nature (if he would admit it, as he sometimes did). Overhead, the voices of invisible sea-birds sounded hollower, more ominous, in calling through infinity; the waves assumed ever more vicious shapes for their assaults on the coral; something—a sea-urchin must have died; and a white light threatened to expose the more protected corners of human personality. Mr Roxburgh was fully exposed. In advancing towards this land’s end, he felt the trappings of wealth and station, the pride in ethical and intellectual aspirations, stripped from him with a ruthlessness reserved for those who accept their importance or who have remained unaware of their pretentiousness. Now he even suspected, not without a horrid qualm, that his devoted wife was dispensable, and their unborn child no more than a footnote on nonentity.
So the solitary explorer gritted his teeth, sucked on the boisterous air with caution, and visibly sweated. He might have been suffering from a toothache rather than the moment when self-esteem is confronted with what may be pure being—or nothingness.
Arrived at his destination, the dwindling headland on which he might have erected a moral altar for the final stages of his martyrdom, Mr Roxburgh discovered that he had taken too much for granted. Stretched on the ground as though consigning his meagre flesh to decomposition by the sea air, lay Spurgeon the steward. It could not have been an unpleasanter surprise.
‘Ha, Spurgeon!’ he managed to address the fellow. ‘You have forestalled me!’
The steward did not attempt to move, but ejaculated, ‘Eh?’ from out of his emaciated, putty-coloured face and sparse tufts of beard.
‘I mean,’ the intruder continued, ‘I hardly expected a human being here where the land has almost become sea again. Are you so attracted to what we have just escaped?’
‘How about yerself?’ Spurgeon answered.
It did seem to place them in the same category, but Mr Roxburgh rejected that.
‘Ah, no!’ Slowly Spurgeon rubbed his head against the crushed coral which for its next phase would be converted into sand. ‘Not a “’uman being”. No one can accuse me of that—where there isn’t no more ’n skin an’ bone, and a fart or two. I won’t inconvenience you, sir, much longer.’
‘Are you sick, then?’ it was Mr Roxburgh’s duty to ask.
Holding his precious book, he had seated himself on a stone beside this thoroughly repulsive object.
‘Not sick,’ the steward replied. ‘The way I see it I’m simply fizzlin’ out.’
He sat up, and proceeded slowly to turn his neck, which his companion quite expected to creak.
‘’Ere,’ he said, parting the hair to exhibit a place above the nape, ‘I’ll be blowed if I’m not startin’ a boil. And that’s the worst sign of any. The sea-boils. See it?’
Mr Roxburgh would not let himself.
‘Feel then,’ Spurgeon invited.
Mr Roxburgh decided against it.
Spurgeon continued rubbing the nape of his neck. ‘I knewed this mornin’ early that I’ll never come out of this. There’s nothin’ like the sea-boils for makin’ a man fall apart quick.’
Faced with this human derelict, Austin Roxburgh realized afresh that his experience of life, like his attitude to death, had been of a predominantly literary nature; in spite of which, it was required of him to exert himself as a member of the ruling class, for so he must still appear to others in spite of his recent enlightenment.
‘Cheer up, old chap!’ he encouraged, and his voice echoed the accents of some forgotten tutor. ‘Don’t you feel—I mean—that you owe it to your wife?’
This initial piece of advice only made the steward glummer. ‘If I ’ad one,’ he mumbled.
‘No,’ said Spurgeon. ‘Or not long enough to notice. But wot’s the odds? A man sleeps the tighter without. There were never room for that many toe-nails in the same bed.’
The ridge of Mr Roxburgh’s distinguished cheekbones coloured very lightly. ‘Marriage’, he suggested, ‘is not entirely physical. I should hate, at least, to think it was.’
‘If it wasn’t, a man could settle for a dawg. I did too,’ Spurgeon remembered, ‘after a while.’
‘Of which breed?’ Although by no means doggy himself, Mr Roxburgh welcomed an opportunity for leading their conversation down a safer path.
‘Don’t know as she was any partickler breed. A sort of dawg. That’s about all. She’d sit an’ look at me—and I’d look back. There was nothin’ between us that wasn’t above board.’
‘The affection of a faithful animal is most gratifying,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded; he found himself stuttering for what must have been the first time, ‘but—mmmorally there is no comparison with the love of a devoted woman.’
‘Don’t know about that,’ the steward replied. ‘I weren’t born into the moral classes.’
If Mr Roxburgh did not hear, it was on account of a sense of guilt he was nursing, for the many occasions on which he had abandoned someone else to drowning by clambering aboard the raft of his own negative abstractions. Her hair floated out behind her as though on the surface of actual water instead of in the depths of his thoughts.
He recovered himself and informed his friend, ‘Salt water has medicinal properties. Or so they tell us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Have you tried rubbing it with salt water?’
‘Rubbin’ what?’
‘The boil, of course!’ Elated by his own inspiration Mr Roxburgh resolved to overlook obtuseness in another.
‘There’s no way out if you’re for it.’ Spurgeon snorted so contemptuously he might have attained social status without his companion’s realizing.
‘But who’s to know, my dear fellow, unless we try? The ability to correct wrong was vested in us for practical use.’
Mr Roxburgh would have been hard put to it to explain how he had come by a precept which was as reasonable as it sounded arcane; while Spurgeon looked the glummer for his own native ignorance.
The steward sat watching this ninny of a gentleman whose good intentions were driving him down the coral ramp towards the sea. After receiving a bash in the face from a mounting wave, Mr Roxburgh stooped to plunge his cupped hands.
There was little enough water in the cup by the time the physician reached the patient’s side.
‘Open up! Quick! The place!’ Mr Roxburgh cried; faith, once lit, was blazing in him.
Of a damper humour, Spurgeon failed to kindle, but submitted his neck to the virtues of salt water.
Mr Roxburgh who originally had no intention of touching the boil was now faced with doing so, or the meagre drop of water would escape. So he set to, gingerly at first, grimacing with a disgust his patient was fortunately unable to see, and rubbed with stiffened, bony fingers, till the activity itself began to soothe, not the patient necessarily, but without a doubt the physician.
For the first time since landing on this desert island Austin Roxburgh was conscious that the blood was flowing through his veins. To an almost reprehensible extent, he throbbed and surged with gratitude. He was grateful not only to this unsavoury catalyst the steward, but to his absent wife, and the miracle of their unborn child.
He went so far as to take a good look at the inflamed lump which the steward had predicted would become a boil.
‘Am I hurting, Spurgeon?’
‘Yes.’
It was reason enough for discontinuing the treatment, after which they rested awhile, side by side, when Mr Roxburgh became for the second time inspired.
‘Do you know what? Soap!’
‘Soap? What?’
‘If we could but lay our hands on some.’
‘There’s soap they brought along in case of caulkin’ the bloody long-boat.’
‘But sugar as well.’
‘I got a bit of sugar—if ’tisn’t melted—for sweetin’ up me rum ration.’
‘Soap and sugar, Spurgeon, have well-known drawing powers.’
The steward might have grown less inclined to humour an eccentric gentleman’s whims, but time hung half as heavy in a mate’s company, however undesirable the mate in the eyes of ordinary men. Either anticipation of their disapproval, or friction by salt water, or the prospect of a soap-and-sugar poultice, or the tingling of an inadmissible affection, had brought the gooseflesh out on Spurgeon.
While Austin Roxburgh tingled with his inspiration; in fact he was indebted to old Nurse Hayes for a method she had used in drawing the pus out of Garnet after his brother had scratched his arm on a rusty nail.
When she had satisfied her own needs, and failed to set eyes on her husband, Mrs Roxburgh went in search of him. At the same time she could not have denied that she experienced a delicious pleasure in being alone, even in her clinging, sodden garments, her slashed boots, and hair by now too wild and too matted to be dealt with by any means at her command. She must have looked a slattern stalking through the scrub. Her elegant boots, she suspected, might always have been what Aunt Triphena would have called ‘trumpery’. But the sun flattered her as she strolled, and the wind, although gusty, was less vindictive than while they were at sea. Each warmed and dried, and in performing its act of charity, enclosed her in an envelope of evaporating moisture, so that she might have been walking through one of the balmy mornings she remembered on her native heath, except that furze and hussock had been replaced by thickets which tore more savagely, and starved creepers set gins for unwary ankles, and lizards were more closely related to stone.
She was content, however—and hopeful at last for her child: that he would survive, not only the physical rigours of what was no longer a doomed voyage, but also the moral judgment of those who might ferret over his features. She did pray that, whatever her shortcomings, the child would be theirs and no one else’s.
A comparatively steep rise in the ground had reduced her gait to a dull and breathless plodding, when a change in the climate told her that she was emerging on the island’s weather side. She was blasted by a gale. It took her hair and tossed it aloft, and filled her clothes, and spun her round amongst the quaking, but more inured bushes. She would have turned at once and made her way back had it not been for a bird’s call becoming human voice. She looked down to where the land shelved towards the sea, and saw a figure, arms thrashing to attract attention. Again the cries were directed at her: it was Oswald Dignam’s voice she heard. Holding herself stiffly and sideways in the vain hope of evading the gale, she began climbing down to meet him, her stumbling once or twice caused either by spasms of fear, or waves of pleasure at thought of a companionship so undemanding it could but add a benison to solitude.
The wind behind him, Oswald quickly reached her, together with a lash of driven spray, and opened a clenched hand to offer an amorphous mass of some kind of shellfish he must have battered from their anchorage.
‘They’s for you, Mrs Roxburgh,’ his almost girlish voice gasped.
‘Oh, but we must all share what we find, the captain tells us,’ she replied sententiously.
‘Who’s to know?’ the boy asked. ‘If you ’adn’t come I’d ’uv ate them meself—like anybody else.’
His natural, milky skin grown fiery on the voyage made him look the more indignant for what she had only half-intended as an accusation.
‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘we are all weak, I expect,’ but did not add, ‘and myself the weakest,’ because he was only a boy.
Overcoming an initial nausea, she took the still quivering mess of mutilated shellfish from the palm on which it lay, and swallowed it at one gulp. To her consternation, some of the shell went down with the flesh; other fragments she arrested with her tongue, and spat them out. She could feel that some of her s
aliva was dribbled on her chin.
It was Oswald Dignam’s turn to smile his pleasure and approval.
He was again in love, she saw from the trembling and wincing of the face which observed her, and she would have gathered up his fiery head, as she had been tempted to caress its milder counterpart on a foggy afternoon at sea.
Instead she murmured with the kind of stiff formality he might have expected of her, ‘Thank you, Oswald, you are indeed my friend, and I hope will always remain so.’ As she spoke she felt the child inside her move as though in response to a relationship.
Oswald was deeper enslaved; beads of salt encrusting his eyebrows were visibly translated into drops of water; she watched them fall upon his cheeks.
‘There’s more, Mrs Roxburgh,’ he managed despite a tongue which had swollen at its root. ‘If you wait I’ll fetch ’em for ye.’
He ran back towards the edge of the reef while she waited for this further tribute; probably no one, not even her husband, would have thought her worthy of it. So she could not help but smile, whether from appeased vanity or tender fulfilment it was not the moment to consider.
On reaching the water’s edge, Oswald began bashing at the coral with a stone. The sight of his small, crouching figure made her clutch her own more tightly. Had he really been her child instead of a diminutive lover, she would have called him back. In the circumstances she continued watching, lips parted between pleasure and anxiety. When the sea rose, and with a logic which had only been suspended, it seemed to her now, swept him off the ledge on which he had been precariously perched.
Oswald Dignam was carried out, at best a human sacrifice, at worst an object for which there was no further use. Alternately sucked under and bobbing on the surface, he continued resisting his fate. His arms were raised several times, fists clenched, lips protesting against the mystery of divine prerogative, before the sea put a glassy stopper in his mouth. Although he was still being tossed and turned by surf boiling in and out of submerged potholes, she knew she would never see him again, unless as a wraith to be coerced out of her already over-haunted memory.
The Fringe of Leaves Page 22